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Talk:Character Creation/@comment-37.214.26.23-20190305174937/@comment-45075715-20200218192206
@Gorvex I like the idea of your build a lot but find it so difficult to execute compared to combat beast. I'd appreciate more details on how you do it. For PoP, I've found a personal need to create combat beasts more than just about any other mod, since I find the early game absolutely brutal. I find managing troops and winning tournaments too difficult otherwise (how do you even win Elacrai tournaments without an absolute beast when I struggle so much even with a total combat beast?). So what I tend to do starting out is actually ignore the merchant quest and solo mountain and forest bandits on horse and bow with a combat beast build. We gain renown and levels super quickly this way: I can usually get to level 20 or so in the first hour or two of playing this way as well as get the required 150+ renown to enter tournaments within the first in-game week since we get so much renown soloing even weak bandits (often 10+ renown per encounter even with some of the weakest and smallest spawns in the game) provided we face them without any companions or troops. Gimme an extra hour or two and I can have enterprises in every city in the entire world as it takes me only minutes by this point to get 10-12k denars (solo a battle or two and sell loot/prisoners or just win a tourney). My favorite way so far starting out is just buy lots of arrows in starting town to fill up stash and start soloing weak bandit spawns right away with nomad bow and winged mace. The winged mace with merchant choice comes in handy for prisoners, and I switch to two-handed blunt weapon (ex: sledgehammer) and a second quiver once I find one. Then level up and get renown to 150 for tourneys and start rushing enterprises across the map (takes no time at all with this approach). Soon enough I've got more money than I know what to do with in this stage, and that's when I consider the mid-game switch where I start recruiting troops, join a faction, join KO, etc. I just pump all my skill points into combat prioritizing power draw, then weapon master, then power strike (hit hard and hit fast). Then AGI focus although I don't rush to get noldor spirit horse like op and usually good with 5 riding for a good while (I tend to favor shield a lot in tricky spots as high shield can be a lifesaver to deplete enemy throwing weapons while I circle around on mount, e.g.). I don't even bother with looting as I prefer to just be able to blaze through battles and still get very good hauls worth thousands of denars when combined with prisoners from even weak bandits (I don't try to get prisoners with melee as much for powerful spawns and use the safety of the bow, but their loot is worth so much anyway typically), and still occasionally a really exceptional piece of super good equipment I can use along with lucky gold bars and such. I change my equipment from time to time depending on what I'm fighting, like I'll favor two shields at times and circle around enemies that throw stuff until they run out of ammo (most tedious way to fight so I tend to avoid enemies like Vanskerry and Snake Cult if I can help it), then back to stash and pick them off with my usual equipment. I sometimes use really silly gear like two shields, no melee weapon, and bow and arrows. Once we survive early game, I find the mid-game actually the most difficult with the way I approach it. Late game starts to become easy for me once we have KO and especially CKO units to steamroll the map. I also favor the sapphire rune bow over ruby. It's actually in part because I'm not such a good shot, especially when I'm mounted against other mounted units. I find it easier to just spray and pray with the speed of fire (often taking out the mounts first if I'm against other cavalry), and 42p is still often good enough to take out units lacking shield in one shot. But mostly I find the firing speed very helpful to just lob arrows left and right and get the lucky headshot here and there and deplete quivers quickly. It seems to raise my archery proficiencies faster (especially once I start getting powerful troops, since they kill the enemy so quickly that I need rapid firing speed to even deplete half my quiver before the battle is over), and I can always run to the stash and pick up more quivers if I go through all of mine in a battle. Maybe one of my weaknesses is that I have a very difficult time playing PoP as a proper commander using main faction troops. Since the top-tier units are so high-level, I find trainer skill not very useful in PoP since it would take an extremely high level character to train a single Empire Armored Crossbow (Empire tends to by my favorite besides Ravenstern, as I love archers/crossbows) given that an Empire Crossbowman is already level 30. Then by the time we reach level 30+ and/or we have a sufficient number of level 30+ companions with high training skill, there's no longer a need for main faction troops as KO and CKO units are so superior. I tend to put zero points into trainer as a result and don't bother with training quests for villages. So I find the only decent way to get decent troops early on is through battles to train our main faction troops over training skill (and it still takes ages and so many battles to train a single top-tier unit through battle), recruiting high-tier prisoners (which makes it difficult to coordinate our army with eclectic troops recruited sporadically from prisoners), or recruiting high-tier troops from taverns. Yet all of this is very costly early on before we've established enterprises everywhere. I actually enjoy playing more like a commander than combat beast these days. Combat beast tends to make me tired after repeated battles back-to-back kiting enemies, so I often find it more relaxing to sit back, maybe just harass troops, while my troops demolish the enemy. It also seems more "proper", like the way I kite enemies feels borderline exploitative of the AI's faults. But I haven't found an effective way to do that early on in PoP so I tend to keep finding myself abandoning my attempts at builds like yours and then going back to combat beast as a way to make the early-mid game tolerable until I start getting KO and especially heavily-invested CKO units (at which point those CKO troops make me so powerful that I cease to care about late-game character build optimization -- just have one companion with 10 in surgery and I'm really happy while my party of 20 CKO knights takes out an army of 300).